Jeff Bezos: from making hamburgers at McDonald’s to being the second richest man in the world

The creator of Amazon acknowledges that he learned the logistical fundamentals of the technological giant in the kitchen of a hamburger restaurant

Created in 1995 as a web page for the sale of books,
amazon It has expanded to unsuspected limits and today it is one of those companies that, it can be said, dominate the world and our lives. The author of such a work is
Jeff Bezosthe second largest fortune on the planet: approximately 163,000 million euros, according to Forbes magazine.

Bezos’ business career responds more or less to the well-worn label of ‘self made man’, the self-made man. He is not heir to any great fortune, nor did he have a life different from that of any normal kid in New Mexico in the 70s.

Bezos was born on January 12, 1964 in the state capital, Albuquerque. The son of a teenage mother, he ended up taking the surname of his adoptive father, a Cuban of Spanish origin named Miguel Bezos. He never met his biological parent.

Make hamburgers to pay for studies

His first steps in the business world were taken when he was just a 16-year-old boy who worked at a McDonalds to pay for his studies at the Miami Palmetto Senior High School in the town of Florida, where the Bezos family moved after from a brief stay in Houston.

Bezos had no management responsibility at that burger joint. But between the kitchen stoves he learned the logistical and business fundamentals that have made, with their lights and not a few shadows, Amazon an almost perfect production gear. Bezos himself recalled, in an interview with the Fast Company magazine, how his job on the grill consisted of “keeping everything going at the right pace during the rush of the shifts with more food dispatch.”

That summer, while he was sweating profusely between the stoves, he took advantage of it not only to earn a few dollars, but for something that would end up being much more useful: studying the company’s automation improvements. For example, the beeps and the signals to know when to “flip the burgers and take the fries out of the boiling oil”.

It was, as he admits, the way to know what customer service really is. Something that turns out, he assures him in the interview, “very difficult”. But the main conclusion that he drew in that summer in the kitchen is that the lessons “can be learned in any job”, even if it is based on turning the hamburgers and removing the fries from the oil.

“My first job”

On August 28, Bezos evoked those times while eating a McDonalds hamburger. A moment captured by a photograph that he shared on his Twitter account with the following message: “My first job. And it’s still the same great burger. Happy Sunday!”.

Bezos’s path passed from that summer of 1980 along other paths than that of the hospitality industry. He studied computer science and electrical engineering at Princeton University. And after working in various positions related to his academic training, he founded cadabra.com, an online bookstore that was the embryo of what would soon become Amazon.

Alan Dumaine, in his book ‘Bezonomics’, however, maintains that it is a mistake to consider that Amazon was created as a web page where you can buy books. The American journalist believes that it has always been what it is today, a technology company.

An almost perfect gear

The reason for its success is to build an almost perfect gear whose engine is artificial intelligence. A place where customer obsession, “breathtaking innovation” and long-term thinking come together. According to Dumaine, Amazon’s mechanics resemble “a two-ton stone cogwheel sitting on a suspended axle.”

The secret to making it move is to apply “enough power day and night to make the gear move faster and faster until it moves on its own.” A concept of work that she did not begin to internalize in the shiny classrooms of Princeton, but rather in the sticky kitchen of that McDonald’s.

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Jeff Bezos: from making hamburgers at McDonald’s to being the second richest man in the world